This invention is related in general to communications systems and more specifically relates to systems and methods for facilitating captioning for communications applications, such as conferencing applications.
Systems for facilitating captioning are employed in various applications including foreign-film language captioning, television-broadcast audio captioning, and videoconference audio captioning. Such systems demand accurate, versatile, and efficient captioning systems.
Accurate and versatile captioning systems are particularly important in conferencing applications, such as teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and/or Web-conferencing applications, where widely-varying operating conditions often reduce captioning accuracy and demand additional versatility to accommodate the different operating conditions.
One conventional videoconferencing system with captioning functionality employs a human translator that listens to the conference and types a written record of the conversation. The written record of the conversation may then be transferred, via captions, to participants in the conference. Unfortunately, the participants, including the translator, may have difficulty understanding speakers with multiple accents, speakers in noisy environments, and so on. Furthermore, such conferencing systems often require excessive bandwidth in certain conferencing applications.
Generally, existing captioning systems often ineffectively address communication issues arising from multiple accents and/or languages, hearing problems, background noise, bad communications-link audio quality, and so on.